It’s critical that the state offers essential protection for essential farmworkers
The impacts of the pandemic are many, and they are not equally shared.
Through the hundreds of phone surveys and interviews our organizations conducted in the Central Valley last year as part of a COVID-19 Farmworkers Survey, we documented that the pandemic exacerbated long-standing insecurity, risk and health disparities for farmworkers and their families.
In the region that is known as the “Food Basket” of the world, farmworkers who grow and harvest our food have been disproportionately affected, especially those from Indigenous and immigrant communities.
Yet, even as we grapple with recovery from the COVID crisis, another one looms larger and will last longer: climate change.
The effects of climate change are not a future threat in the Central Valley. They already are here.
We have seen droughts, extreme temperatures and wildfires, and last year was probably the worst. At the end of July of 2020, during the spike in COVID-19 cases that followed the Fourth of July celebrations, our region was engulfed by some of the worst wildfires in our history.
The air quality index was double the level that dictates that employers must provide workers with N95 masks. Yet, thousands of workers, without N95 masks, remained in the fields harvesting fruits and vegetables, with COVID and the smoke hanging over their heads.
“No, el patron no me ha dado una mascara N95, solo me dio una al principio de la pandemia”. (“No, I haven’t received from my employer a N95 mask, I only received one mask at the beginning of the pandemic”).
This was typical of the answers we received from the hundreds of farmworkers we spoke with while visiting the fields to distribute the masks and COVID education last summer.
California has a huge budget surplus of more than $75 billion. We believe that a fraction of that surplus must be invested in holistic solutions that build a more resilient, decentralized and healthy food system that prioritizes the safety, health and wellbeing of our farmworkers, food workers and communities of color.
We were pleased to see that Gov. Newsom’s proposed 2021-22 budget included funding for sustainable, climate-smart farming practices and to restore groundwater supplies to drought-proof our food system. However, we need to do better, especially for farmworkers.
We urge the governor and Legislature to fund a stockpile of equipment to protect workers from smoke and COVID-19, build multi-unit affordable housing for farmworker families, and upgrade existing farmworker residences to be more energy efficient and with improved indoor air quality.
A housing development in Winters called Mutual Housing at Spring Lake provides a state-of-the-art model for what we need here in the Central Valley, with 100 of its zero net energy apartments and townhomes dedicated to farmworkers earning no more than 60 percent of the area median income.
The personal health and safety of each of us depends on our community and the investment of our government. The same is true with food. We need the right infrastructure to have healthy farms to grow our food, and we need to finally invest in our essential workers to afford to live and have the right protections.
Nayamin Martinez is the executive director of the Central California Environmental Justice Network that seeks to eliminate negative environmental impacts in low income and communities of color in the Central Valley.
Sarait Martinez is the executive director of Centro Binacional para el Desarrollo Indígena Oaxaqueño (CBDIO), serving indigenous Oaxacan migrant communities in California.
This story was originally published May 31, 2021 at 5:00 AM.